Water | Resources
Responsible Down Standard
Question from Gina
Hi Debra,
Hope all’s well.
You may know about the Responsible Down Standard. To reduce demand for down made with crowding, force-feeding and live plucking. Glad to see this issue finally being addressed!
www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/responsible-down-standard
Love,
Gina
Debra’s Answer
Thanks for sending this.
Amazing Pumpkin Pancakes
These pancakes are amazing because you only need TWO ingredients to make a real pancake! Just eggs and pureed pumpkin, plus pumpkin pie spices of your choice. But just the eggs and pumpkin themselves make a real pancake that looks like a pancake, tastes like a pancake, and has the texture of a pancake. Totally gluten-free. And you can make them in a minute. And this little recipe gives you a whole tall stack of pancakes!
If you add freshly grated nutmeg you don’t even need any sweetener, because the nutmeg is sweet. I just made these for breakfast and the aroma of nutmeg is wafting into my office still.
I described these pancakes the other morning on Toxic Free Talk Radio when I interviewed chef Danny Boome, host of the new season of Good Food America. He raved about the nutrition benefits and called them “autumn in a plate.” I agree.
A friend of mine made a batch and loved them.
Now you can use canned pumpkin if you must, but remember the can linings contain BPA, which is an endocrine disruptor. It’s so easy to roast your own pumpkin, please give it a try. Roasted pureed pumpkin keeps well in the refrigerator, and then you have it on hand for pancakes any morning, or to use in other pumpkin recipes (see below).
OK. Here’s the recipe!
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 cup pumpkin puree
- ground cinnamon
- freshly grated nutmeg
- butter or coconut oil for the pan
- Beat the eggs with a whisk in a medium-sized bowl until the yolks are well mixed with the whites.
- Add the pumpkin puree and blend it in thoroughly.
- Add spices to taste.
- Heat your pan on medium high heat. Add a small amount of butter or coconut oil. Actually, best results come from using a “ceramic” nonstick pan such as Cusisinart Green Gourmet. The pancakes don’t stick at all.
- Use about 2 tablespoons of batter per pancake. The pancakes will “set up” like a regular pancake, but you won’t get the bubbles. When they set up after a few minutes, it’s time to flip them over using a spatula.
- Cook for another minute or two and transfer pancakes to a plate.
You can top with butter, maple syrup, fruit, or anything you would usually put on pancakes. But they are yummy just plain, too.
You might also like these other pumpkin recipes on this blog:
* Pumpkin Hummus
* Pumpkin Muffins
* Pumpkin Pie for Everyone (my personal favorite – sweet without sweetener!)
What You Need to Know About Your HVAC and Indoor Air Quality
Today my guest is Judy Rachel, a Home Performance Professional specializing in third party, independent home energy audits, best green building practices specifications and HVAC system design. We’ll be talking about the basics of how your HVAC works, choosing correct filters, why we have indoor air quality problems and how to solve them, and how to get to know your HVAC system so you can use it properly. Judy writes and teaches building science / energy efficiency curricula for various community and city colleges, as well as for workforce training programs. She provides both classroom and hands-on trainings. She is a senior lead trainer for Efficiency First California, training contractors in the Home Performance with Energy Star curriculum. She is a lead trainer for Energy Conservation Institute’s Building Performance Institute (BPI) Certification trainings. Judy is President of the Eco-Home Network, a non-profit devoted to greening as many homes as possible. She is the field mentor for contractors participating in the Southern California Home Upgrade program. Along with being certified as a Building Analyst, Envelope Specialist, Heating Specialist and A/C and Heat Pump Professional through BPI, she is a field proctor for these certifications. As a HERS rater (Home Energy Rater) she does diagnostic testing, verifications and inspections for residential and small commercial buildings to ensure compliance with California’s Energy Code. Certified by Build It Green, she is a GreenPoint rater for new construction and a Certified Green Building Professional. Through National Comfort Institute she holds their Air Balancing and Carbon Monoxide & Combustion Certifications. Judy thinks the most amazing part of what she does is that by creating energy efficient homes she is actually able to improve the comfort, durability, indoor air quality, as well as, occupant safety within homes. www.greenachers.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
What You Need to Know About Your HVAC and Indoor Air Quality
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Judy Rachel
Date of Broadcast: October 30, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. The first thing I want to tell you today – oh, besides the fact that it’s October 30 and it’s Halloween tomorrow – I should have on my website (and I doubt it), but if you had subscribed to my newsletter, I’ve been sending out different bits and pieces on the newsletter about how to have a less toxic Halloween.
There had been a few things that had come out, different organizations with things. But you might want to take a look at – there’s a website called HealthyStuff.org. They’ve just done a study of toxic chemicals in Halloween costumes and accessories and all those things for Halloween. So just go to HealthyStuff.org and take a look at what they had to say about the toxic chemicals in Halloween.
And you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and type in “healthy halloween” into the search box and you can listen to an interview I did with Annie Bond. We talked about different ways that we have had toxic-free Halloweens in the past and different things that you can do.
So I just encourage you to type in “halloween” or “green halloween”, “non-toxic halloween” in your favorite search engine and see what comes up because there’s a lot of things to know about how toxic Halloween can be and making it a less toxic occasion for your children.
So all that said, today, what we’re going to talk about is your HVAC system, which is ‘heating, ventilation and airconditioning’. I think that’s right, but my guest will correct me. We’re going to talk about indoor air quality.
And I decided to have this guest on because I was talking with her and she gave me so much information about my HVAC system that I didn’t know. I live here in Clearwater, Florida where we are in air-conditioning. My HVAC is on seven or eight months of the year. The things that I didn’t know, I thought all of you should know because if you have HVAC (as most people do), you need to know how it’s affecting your indoor air quality, what you can do. We’re going to talk about all these things.
My guest today is Judy Rachel. She’s a home performance professional specializing in third-party, independent home energy audits, best green building practices specifications and HVAC systems design. And so today, we’re going to be talking about the basics of how your HVAC system works, choosing correct filters, why we have indoor air quality problems and how to solve them and how you can get to know your HVAC system so that you can use it properly. So we’ve got a lot to talk about.
Hi, Judy.
JUDY RACHEL: Hi, Debra!
DEBRA: How are you today?
JUDY RACHEL: I’m doing great. How about you?
DEBRA: Good. And you’re in Los Angeles, right?
JUDY RACHEL: Yeah.
DEBRA: How’s the air quality there today?
JUDY RACHEL: Well, the air quality is just what it is in L.A. We’re a great, big city. I am in a valley where we have inversion layer. So it’s definitely got its good days and its bad days. Fall is definitely kind of a better season for us with the air quality. But all that being said, indoor air quality, studies are showing, is much worse than outdoor air quality even in cities like L.A.
DEBRA: Yes. And those studies have been going on for many, many years and we’ll talk about that.
I just wanted to say that I have a friend who lives in L.A. who is also a building scientist like you are. She does consultations about fixing your HVAC for indoor air quality purposes. But also, what was so interesting to me when I went to her house what a difference it made that I always thought I could just never live in L.A. But being in her house, the difference between the outdoor air quality and the indoor air quality was just amazing.
And of course, she lives in a completely non-toxic house. So she’s reducing her indoor [inaudible 00:05:43] source as she should. It made so much difference to not just have any old HVAC, but to be able to do the right thing and understand how it is. So I know it can make a huge, huge difference.
But before we get into the details, tell us how you got interested in this subject.
JUDY RACHEL: Well, I was actually searching very specifically for a job that I could be doing every single day of my life that I could feel good about, that was going to match up with my values of wanting to live a green, sustainable, non-toxic life. And in that search, I happened to kind of fall into building science.
I heard about home energy audits. I talked my way into a class on home performance and building science and I was lost. It’s absolutely fascinating. It’s amazing, the things that we don’t know or understand about the way our homes perform and the fact that in making a home energy efficient, we have all these wonderful byproducts. We get increased comfort, we get better indoor quality, we create more durable homes, we create healthier and safer homes.
So it just was this incredible revelation, “This is awesome! It’s fascinating. I could do this every day and wake up happy to be doing this.”
DEBRA: That’s really good. I’m so glad that you’re doing it because it is a field that people need to understand. It’s kind of technical. You explained it so clearly to me that I’m sure that the listeners are going to understand everything you say today.
So first, let’s start with explain the basics of an HVAC system.
JUDY RACHEL: Well, so basically, there’s actually two components to what we call an HVAC system. We have the component that we are actually conditioning the air in our home. And so that’s really the heating and air-conditioning component of it.
Typically, it’s best that it’s a completely separate system from the v portion, which is ventilation. The heating and cooling portion is conditioning our air. It’s supposed to be about comfort. And part of comfort is actually moisture removal in air-conditioning.
The v portion, ventilation is really about the contaminant and pollutants in our air and getting proper air changes through our house. It has its own two components. We have a source point ventilation where we’re actually removing the contaminants at a particular source.
So say in a bathroom where we have high moisture issues (showers, baths, that type of thing as well as odors), we want that sources removed. In the kitchen, we’re cooking. There’s combustion byproducts. We want those sources of contaminants removed.
And then we have the second component of ventilation, which is the whole house ventilation where we actually need to create air changes from the indoors to the outdoors, so that we get this body of air that moves through the house, so we actually can remove pollutants that might be building up in the home.
DEBRA: And that would include even things like if you think that you don’t have pollution (like I think I don’t have pollution in my house because I don’t have toxic chemicals), that would include things like the pollution that’s created when we breathe, when we exhale, things like dust mites that might be coming off your bad or…
JUDY RACHEL: Exactly!
DEBRA: Tell us about some of those pollutants that w might not be thinking of.
JUDY RACHEL: Right! And so the thing is is that dusts are very living. So even when we are making tremendous effort to not bring contaminants into our homes, the very fact of our existence in an enclosed space is creating – basically, we can call them contaminants. We are creating stale air. We’re breathing in the O2, we’re breathing out the CO2. We need to make sure that we have the right balance and mix of those things.
And then, our various cleaning supplies are releasing things. So, of course, if we’re trying to clean much more non-toxically, then there’s going to be less of that. But these things do build up. Just every effort we make – our skins are still shedding cells and if we have any pets, there’s dander. So there are just all kinds of things that are building up and basically just making the air stale when we have an enclosed environments, which is what our homes are. And in order for us to keep…
DEBRA: And we… go ahead.
JUDY RACHEL: Oh, I was going to say just so in order for us to keep our conditioned air conditioned in our houses, we do need to have an enclosed environment, so we need to make sure that we’re also getting the air changes.
DEBRA: Yeah, we need to go to the break, but I want to ask you a question about that when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Judy Rachel. She’s a home performance professional specializing in energy and indoor air quality. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Judy Rachel. She’s a home performance professional specializing in both indoor air quality and also energy efficiency. These two things go together and I’m so interested in that balance.
So Judy, would you just tell us more about – I really want us, all the listeners and myself, to understand that the HVAC system, there’s this balance going on in our homes where we need to have the air heated and cooled in an energy efficient way, which means seal up the house.
That’s one of the reasons why we have indoor air quality problems now. This whole thing about indoor air quality, when I started writing it, it wasn’t even a phrase. It didn’t exist 30 years ago when I started writing.
I remember that then, there was the energy crisis. And after the energy crisis, they said, “We need to seal up all the houses to retain the heat and cooling and reduce the amount of energy we used.” And that’s when we started having indoor air quality problems because prior to that, houses leaked around little cracks and windows and all these things. And now, there was no longer the air exchange.
So tell us more about these opposites of needing to seal the house for energy efficiency, yet needing to have ventilation for indoor air quality.
JUDY RACHEL: So first, I want to say that there’s a little bit of a fallacy that we didn’t have the indoor air quality problems when our houses were leakier.
What’s happening in a leaky building is that the air exchanges are completely random and they’re from random sources. And because of the way physics work, hot moves to cold, wet moves to dry, the natural forces that go on particularly in a leaky house are that we get cold air coming in down low and we get warm air trying to exit up high. It creates this whole invective loop and pressure differentials that are happening from inside to outside.
And so if I’m bringing air in from down low in my climate air, that’s from raised foundation. So I’m sitting on top of a bunch of dirty, disgusting earth that very often has all kinds of rodents and raccoons and possums, skunks and everything else that get underneath my houses and…
DEBRA: Me too, me too.
JUDY RACHEL: …and/or even moist basements and things like that and in other parts of the country. So we’re bringing in air from those really horrible places into our home. And then it’s also trying to exit out the top of our home.
And then in the summer, it actually reverses. And so now, I’m bringing in air from my attic, which is another place where there’s all kinds of stuff going on up there that I really don’t care to be breathing that air.
So in our leaky houses, the air exchanges were much quicker, but they were still coming from sources that I really didn’t want to be breathing that air.
Then there’s also the portion of I basically built a home to shelter myself from outside conditions because I’m just not as hardy as, say, my predecessors in human history. So I want some comfort, I want an enclosure to keep me safe and to keep me comfortable.
So now, I’ve put in a forced air system. So I’m heating and cooling my air, but if the house is leaky, then my conditioned air is coming and going. The outside air is coming in and it’s messing up this air that I’m paying to condition.
So that’s where a lot of the energy efficiency comes in. If I have a leaky building and I’m trying to heat or cool it, I’m spending much more money heating and cooling that air because it is randomly coming and going and I don’t have any control over that.
Then the way that I deliver the air into the house is through this air distribution system, the air ducts. If those air ducts are leaky, then I’m bringing in this unconditioned air that’s also very typically from the crawl spaces that my ducts are running in or the attic if that’s where my ducts are running through or the walls if that’s where my ducts are running through.
So I’m losing my conditioned air, I’m bringing in unconditioned air and I’m also bringing pollutants in if I don’t make sure that my air distribution system, that those ducts are actually tight.
DEBRA: Yeah.
JUDY RACHEL: So they have both an effect on the energy efficiency of the equipment, of my home, of my energy bill, as well as my indoor air quality.
DEBRA: So one of the things that I didn’t understand several years ago was that I always assumed that air was coming in and out of the house. But I understand that in most, if not all HVA system, what it’s doing is recycling air.
And so the key thing of interest for me about that aside from the fact that we’re probably depleting oxygen is that when you’re recycling the air, then the pollutants that people who aren’t living in toxic-free houses like you and I, just the average American person or the average person in the world, they’ve got all these toxic chemicals going on.
They’re cleaning with toxic chemicals and spraying pesticides and fire retardants on the sofa and all these things and there’s no place for those pollutants to go and they just build up and build up and build up and build up over time to very toxic levels in the home.
So it’s not just what are the toxic chemicals, it’s toxic chemicals plus no ventilation.
So could you just explain about the recycled air and how then does the v part of HVAC work to be making these air exchanges?
JUDY RACHEL: Right! So yes, our forced air system really should just be moving inside air through the house. They shouldn’t be exchanging outside air at all. That’s part of what I was just saying in terms of leaky duct system, is that the force air system in our house and the ducts that are bringing that air to the various rooms is really like the circulatory system of our body. There shouldn’t be an exchange from inside to outside through that system.
So the heating and cooling portion is to make us comfortable, it’s to condition our air and it’s also to remove moisture in climate where moisture is an issue.
DEBRA: Before you go on, let’s go to break and then we’ll put it all together when we come back so you don’t get interrupted by the commercial.
JUDY RACHEL: Okay, great!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is and Judy Rachel from Performance Professional. Her website is GreenAchers.com”>GreenAchers.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Judy Rachel. She’s a home performance professional specializing in indoor air quality and HVA systems.
So Judy, tell us a little more about – we were discussing about how the system recycles the air.
JUDY RACHEL: Great! And so, to recap, the heating and air-conditioning portion of our heating and cooling system, for most of us, was designed and installed to actually be a closed loop within our home. They were not installed to even clean our air. They purely are installed to circulate the air and to condition the air in the house and to remove moisture.
So then that leads us to the ventilation portion of HVAC. And that ventilation portion is very specifically about exchanging indoor and outdoor air and removing contaminants and pollutants in a controlled way (so not random like in a leaky house), in a controlled amount and is absolutely meant to increase the comfort and health of the occupants within the home.
So they’re two very separate systems and…
DEBRA: But they’re all together in one thing. I mean, somebody buys the HVAC and they’re going to get both, right?
JUDY RACHEL: Well, no. So the contractor…
DEBRA: This is a very important point. This is so important.
JUDY RACHEL: Yes.
DEBRA: Okay, go ahead.
JUDY RACHEL: Yeah, so the contractors are called HVAC because we’re still dealing with the movement of air and the principles of how air moves and the pressures that make air move. It moves in the temperature differences that work within air movement and the fact that we typically are distributing – well, we’re distributing air movement through duct systems. They’re motorized, there are fans and blowers.
And so the systems are absolutely within the realm of the same brain. The contractor that’s been trained to do the heating and cooling would very naturally be able to understand how a ventilation system would need to be designed and installed. So the two things are similar in the way that we’re using air, they’re different systems.
So if we want to use your heating and cooling system as a ventilation system, then it needs to be designed that way and we need to now start having some air exchanges from inside to outside happening with it.
None of our systems actually clean the air per se. So that’s not what’s going on with this system. Basically, to remove pollutants is not about scrubbing the air or cleaning it. It’s exchanging it with enough ambient air that is not going to have the parts per million of the pollutants in it.
So to some extent, we’re diluting. We want to truly dilute as in getting rid of it and having a much better body of air available for us.
DEBRA: But then, so this now leads us into two different areas. I just want to mention them both and then go in a certain direction.
So the first thing that I want to say is that if you’re ventilating in, say, Los Angeles, you’re bringing in the outdoor air, which is polluted. But as we said in the beginning that many studies have shown that indoor air pollution is worse than outdoor air pollution because you’ve got the outdoor air pollution and you’ve also got the pollution being produced by all the toxic things and breathing and all those things that are indoor.
And so, the second area then is about filters. I know that we think that if we have HVA systems, we’re putting in the filters in order to filter the air, so that it’s less toxic. But you told me something different. So tell us about filters.
JUDY RACHEL: Right. So the filter in the heating and cooling portion of our system is actually to protect the mechanical components of the system itself. It’s to protect the fan that’s blowing the air and it’s to protect the coil that is creating our [inaudible 00:31:34] air-conditioning, the coil that’s creating the cooling air, that’s taking the heat out of the air. So we need to keep those components clean so that they continue to function well and that whole system is able to function well and efficiently.
So that is truly why there are filters in the heating and cooling portion of our forced air system. It’s for the protection of the systems themselves is not actually to say scrub our air or filter the air for our respiratory health.
DEBRA: Okay! So then, there’s things that consumers need to know about when they go buy the filter because I know that I just go down to Lowe’s or Home Depot or someplace like that and I just was buying the filters that had the highest rating for removing particulates. But there’s reason why we shouldn’t do that. So tell us about that.
JUDY RACHEL: The filters in our system create a resistance to air movement and our systems are based on air moving. And there’s basically a certain budget. Like we have a budget for buying our groceries or for anything else, there is a budget for actually the motor and the system as to how much air it can move and how much air it can move consistently and effectively.
And since we’re trying to deliver the energy, the conditioned energy into the various rooms with the air, we know very specifically how much air we need to be delivering through the whole system and how much needs to go to these particular rooms.
And so every time I put something in the air stream (such as a filter), I am creating some resistance to air flow. And there is not a very big budget for what any of these fans can use. And I’ve got this entire duct system that I have to [inaudible 00:33:36], as well as the coil that I need to put on and so my budget gets used up by all of these things. The filter needs to be only a very small portion of that budget or I basically completely short circuit the entire very expensive system that I have installed and that’s supposed to be keeping me comfortable in my home.
DEBRA: So we need to go to break in just a few seconds. So tell us what is the guideline for what a consumer needs to do to choose the right filter?
JUDY RACHEL: Well, you need to know what the pressure drop is, how much resistance to air flow the particular filter is that you’re putting in a system and if your system can handle that amount of resistance to the air flow.
DEBRA: So that would be that you should use the filters that your contractor recommends. But if you don’t have a contractor (like for me, I just moved into a house and I have no idea which was it), so we’re going to talk about what to do in that case when we come back. And also, we’re going to talk about indoor air quality.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Judy Rachel from Performance Professional in the field of energy efficiency and indoor air quality with HVAC. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Judy Rachel. She’s a home performance professional specializing in balancing energy efficiency and indoor air quality. Her website is GreenAchers.com like ‘ache’, ache like your arm aches or your head aches or your lungs ache.
JUDY RACHEL: Exactly! Yeah, I think of it as “aching to be green”.
DEBRA: “Aching to be green,” good. That’s a good way to remember it. Okay! So if I don’t have any information from the contractor who installed my HVAC system, what is the quick answer about what I should do in order to find out what is the right filter for me?
JUDY RACHEL: Well, the quick answer is that it’s important to have a filter in your system to keep any dust and debris out of your system. So the least expensive filter that’s out there that will fit in the slot is going to be your best bet just to make sure you have a filter in your system.
But then really, the only way that you can possibly find out is a contractor that can specifically leave you with filters so that you can replace those. You would need a contractor to come in and actually measure what’s called the ‘static pressure’, the pressures on the system and to let you know what exact filter you actually can use for your system.
So even [inaudible 00:40:20] filters out there and they might fit into the slot, they absolutely can short circuit your system if they’re creating so much resistance to air flow. And it’s not something that you’re necessarily going to feel at the grill, so you really need to have somebody who can come in and take the measurement across the filter.
DEBRA: Yeah, I actually just had a new air-conditioner installed a few months ago. My contractor did not leave any filters with me or say anything about it. He just installed the filter that I bought from Home Depot. So I’m going to go back to my contractor and ask him specifically about this. He did a really good job installing it, but he just didn’t say anything about this.
And actually, listeners, the first time I’ve even heard about this was from Judy. It makes total sense to me that you want to have the best air movement that you can and protect your system and not have it all fall apart.
So tell us about indoor air quality problems. What are the source of indoor air quality problems and what’s the appropriate way to handle them if we can’t just put a filter on our HVAC and say, “Oh, we’re handling our indoor air quality problems.” People should not assume that they’re handled just because they have a filter in the HVAC.
JUDY RACHEL: Yeah, the indoor air quality issues are myriad and they definitely can come from indoors, outdoors and from things that we bring into our home. So kind of a short, quick, dirty list is you radon issues, there’s just environmental tobacco smoke, biological contaminants such as molds or animal dander or dust mites, bacteria and viruses.
Stoves, heaters, fireplaces and chimneys bring contaminants into our homes. The various household products that we have, formaldehydes in so many of the materials that are used to build our cabinetry and furnishings in our homes, pesticides, asbestos, lead and all the various VOC’s, adhesives, carpets, paint, upholstery, dry cleaning, bringing in dry cleaning to your home. Just washing outside, you track things in from the bottom of your shoes. Synthetic lawn and garden fertilizers as well as pesticides.
So unfortunately, the pollutants and contaminants comes from so many sources. And then, of course, when we do things like take showers or just breathe or cook, we’re also creating moisture. And then all those things that the moisture can actually – those molecules that moisture can attract. And so we want to make sure that we get those things out of our homes as well. And so that’s absolutely where ventilation comes into play.
And so some of the ventilation that we really need to do needs to be straight exhaust. There’s just certain areas of our homes where we need to be exhausting air out of our homes (particularly bathrooms and kitchens). They’re incredibly important.
DEBRA: And every house comes with exhaust fans unless it’s a really old house before they were required by law. But isn’t it like [inaudible 00:43:44] to not have those exhaust fans? So the thing is people have to use them. You need to use your exhaust fans.
JUDY RACHEL: Yeah, it’s so important.
DEBRA: You have to turn them on.
JUDY RACHEL: Turn them on. We need to use them. And so another thing is that there’s new ones that are so wonderfully quiet. So if you don’t turn it on because it’s just too noisy, look into getting one of the ones that has – it’s called the ‘sone rating’, that’s the noise rating, so a lower sone rating so that you don’t mind having it on. But they are essential to use.
And really opening doors and windows as pleasant as it seems and can feel, there’s definitely certain times of the year when most of us can’t open our doors and windows. And the other thing about opening doors and windows is that it’s one thing and it’s not controlled. We don’t know for sure that it’s actually working. If there isn’t a temperature difference from outside to inside, if there’s no wind, if it’s a still day, then there’s actually no movement happening across a door or window.
DEBRA: Wow.
JUDY RACHEL: I love opening my doors and windows, but I also know that that’s more a connection of myself to the outdoors than it is about truly getting ventilation in my household.
DEBRA: I haven’t thought about that.
JUDY RACHEL: Yeah. And so mechanical ventilation systems are just so important to know that I’m actually getting the controlled movement of air into and out of the house that I need to have happen. And in those systems, I absolutely want to design in a filter for those systems, so that I’m not bringing in excessive dust or particulates and other things from outdoors.
But once again, it is about air movement and it’s about air movement with a fan and through a duct system, so I still need to be concerned about is that filter restricting too much air flow. That’s the other part of it. Any of our systems that have filters, it’s really important to change them regularly.
DEBRA: So we’re talking about these two different systems and I’m guessing that if you had a properly designed HVAC system that there would be these two systems operating independently, but together. So that would mean two different kinds of filters, one to keep the conditioning part system clean and the other one, in the ventilation that might be removing pollutants. Is that right?
JUDY RACHEL: Yes. So in the ventilation system, I’m still definitely concerned about whatever fan it is and blower motor that I have in that piece of equipment. So I want to keep it clean. But in the fact that I am exchanging outdoor air with indoor air, I do want it to fit better as a filter that’s going to be stopping any pollutants that I know for sure might be coming in from outdoors (basically, kind of dusty type things in particular). I definitely want to make sure that the filter is good enough that insects aren’t going to be able to bypass it or [inaudible 00:47:09] it and things like that.
DEBRA: Of course! Of course, yes.
JUDY RACHEL: So that filter, I’m going to look at and design so that I’m doing better filtration with that filter rather than just trying to protect my motor with that filter for that system by…
DEBRA: So when you…
JUDY RACHEL: Go ahead.
DEBRA: We only have a couple of minutes left, so I want to make sure I ask this question.
JUDY RACHEL: Yes.
DEBRA: So again, when you’re going down to Home Depot or Lowe’s or whatever store you buy your filter and there’s all these filters on the shelf, most of those filters, if not all are going to be the filters that are keeping your system clean and you’re just going to put them on the slot. Where does this other filter go and how do you replace it?
JUDY RACHEL: So there actually should be a little bit of a filter over your exhaust fan (in your kitchen in particular). So you should make sure that that stays clear of grease and that it’s just right there and accessible.
DEBRA: Right.
JUDY RACHEL: If you actually have a whole house ventilation system put in to your house, then that’s one of the things that our ventilation contractors need to help us with. They need to help those filters to be accessible for us.
And that’s the same thing actually with the heating and cooling portion as well. They still do need to be accessible for us. And that’s why a lot of times, we put them where the return air (where the air goes back into the system) and so there’s a little pop open so we can just pop a filter back in and have that accessible to us.
So that really is something that our contractors need to help us with, to have to call them in every three months or something to change the filters. If that’s unfeasible, we need to be able to take care of that ourselves. Otherwise…
DEBRA: So if I don’t know that there’s a ventilation system like my conditioning system, but that I have fans in the kitchen and in the bathroom, I might not even have a ventilation system?
JUDY RACHEL: Yes. In most of our buildings (unless you’ve had some kind of energy retrofit done), you probably don’t have a whole house ventilation system. You’ve got your exhaust fans.
DEBRA: Okay, good. I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you because we’re coming to the end of the show. We only have a few seconds left.
JUDY RACHEL: Okay.
DEBRA: This has been so interesting and I want everybody to remember that I’m now making transcripts of all the shows. And so in a few days, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look at the transcript of the show, read it.
You can go to Judy’s website, GreenAchers.com. And that’s like “aching to be green.” This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
New TV Show Features Organic, Sustainable, and Healthy Restaurants
My guest today is Danny Boome, internationally-acclaimed TV personality and Chef, known to audiences for his culinary work and dynamic personality. Today we’ll be talking about his new gig as host of Good Food America season two, and what he’s learned from visiting organic, sustainable, and healthy restaurants across America. Following the success of hosting two of 2013’s hit shows: ABC Daytime’s Recipe Rehab and Food Network/The Cooking Channel’s Donut Showdown – Danny has taken to the streets to take viewers on a culinary adventure across America (think: Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, but with far less calories and a super charming English accent) in search of the nation’s best organic, sustainable and healthy restaurants. Viewers will join Danny on his gastronomic journey each Sunday night as he discovers regional gems, native ingredients and the homegrown talent that keeps locals coming back for more. This season, the series will make stops at restaurants from Maine to California, and you can come along too. In addition to hosting television shows, Danny brings his passion for food and culinary exploration to homes, schools and lecture halls across America. He shares his fresh perspective and practical, no-fuss recipes and techniques through cooking workshops, courses and private lessons. As a former European professional ice hockey player, Danny is an active sportsman. Danny’s experiences on the ice, in the kitchen and traveling the country as a self-proclaimed “gastronaut,” enabled him to further promote the benefits of healthy eating and exercise by creating the non-profit organization, Better Fed. Danny started his culinary training in 1999 as a cook in Switzerland – 
doubling up as an au pair for a local family. He later trained at the acclaimed West Wind Inn in Canada and attended the Grange Cookery School in England. Good Food America can be seen on select satellite and cable networks as well as online at ZLiving, which allows you to watch on your computer or on any mobile device. Watch at go.zliving.com/tvshows/good-food-america
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
New TV Show Features Organic, Sustainable, and Healthy Restaurants
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Danny Boome
Date of Broadcast: October 29, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, October 29th 2014. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida in a beautiful autumn day. We’re talking about one of my favorite subjects today, food and eating in restaurants.
I love to eat in restaurants, but the problem with most restaurants is that they serve not very good food and it’s prepared in some not very good ways. And so it’s sometimes difficult to find restaurants that are actually serving organic and healthy food, but there is more and more and more of them.
That’s what we’re going to be talking about today because my guest is Danny Boome. He’s an internationally-acclaimed TV personality and chef and he’s the host of a new show called Good Food America, which just started a couple of weeks ago.
If you don’t have that on your TV channels where you live, you can go online and watch it. It’s a great show. I’ve just been watching. There’s two episodes online right now. I’ve just been watching it and it’s great. It’s just that kind of show like if you’ve ever watched Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives where you go backstage in the restaurant and you get back into the kitchen and you watch the chefs. They explain what they’re doing and they’re creating all these luscious organic foods, sustainable and local. And it just looks gorgeous. You’ll find out exactly what were they doing. And Danny is the host.
Hi, Danny.
DANNY BOOME: Hi! How are you doing today?
DEBRA: I’m doing great. I’m so happy to talk to you because as I’ve said, going to restaurants is one of my favorite things. I have to admit, I do watch Diners, Drive-ins & Dives not because I love Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, but because I like to go back in the kitchen and see what the chefs are doing.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was the whole sort of idea of our show because we wanted to do the health food version of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives basically.
DEBRA: And you did.
DANNY BOOME: But also, we wanted [inaudible 00:03:00] as well because we wanted to open the door, the pantry and the story a little bit more to the viewer because as you just said right now, when you’re looking – I mean, this show actually turned me into a home vegan and a vegetarian. I was actually a big carnivore before I started this. So when you’re going out and you’re looking for good, healthy food or even good, sustainable, organic food, it’s very, very hard to find. I actually find it really hard to find the people that know what to do with it. You know what I mean?
DEBRA: Right! Right, that is the thing.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah!
DEBRA: You can go to just a regular restaurant. Say if you’re a vegetarian, you can go to a regular restaurant and say, “Well, could you give me the vegetable plate,” but it tastes like nothing.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah.
DEBRA: I mean, I’m not a vegetarian. I eat meat, but I eat like grass-fed meat and things like that. But I remember, a few years ago, I was living in San Francisco for three months and I ate all my meals in restaurants and I could not find a sweet potato. I mean, San Francisco even has a lot of good, organic restaurants, but I couldn’t even find a sweet potato.
DANNY BOOME: Well, I’ll tell you what this is and this is what I found on the journey. Basically, what we did was (just to let your listeners know), we went to 25 states, 76 restaurants and around 18 different cities.
DEBRA: Wow!
DANNY BOOME: It was rather an amazing journey because what it was about was when I think of all of us that do the show, it was a case of, “Well, what is…” – and my fingers are right now in open air quotes – “What do we call healthy? Basically, what’s your interpretation of healthy food?” That was the first thing. And the second thing was, “Well then, what’s our interpretation of organic and sustainable?”
And some people are sort of like in the gray area. You’re edging on what is and what’s not.
And basically, I have to give the credit to our research. I really found people that actually understood what people wanted from the foo, but also really nice parameters of, “Okay, well, most of the restaurants we came across that would have a sweet potato or would have something would actually only…” – they would change their menu as seasonally possible. And then they also would procure their ingredients from a maximum of 100 miles. So your carbon footprint was low. There’s a relationship with the farmer or the fisherman or the butcher or the candlestick maker even to know where the food came from.
A lot of the chefs and the owners of these restaurants really put a lot of pride into it, but they also gave a lot of ownership to, say, the waiting staff or the servers. I mean, seriously, we went to a couple of places and everything was from around the corner like a potter would make all the plate and the artist…
DEBRA: Yes, I love that.
DANNY BOOME: …decorated the restaurant. And then the community would buy into that.
And I think when you say you’re going to places and you’re looking for these little restaurants, our show tells you where they are, but also, it also gives you some sort of ownership for yourself to say, “Oh, these guys have got the ethic balance that we want, but also there’s a really cool story like I know this plate came from Fred around the corner and each plate is individual or the trout was…”
I think one of the best places that we found was they got their trout or their fish from Detroit. And ironically, you don’t think of fresh water fish from Detroit, but it was from an urban garden. And these guys, it was the Detroit Christian Urban Botanic or something like that. I can’t remember what they call it. They ship the fish down and they would grow –there would be a fish pond in their warehouse. So it was sustainable.
DEBRA: Yeah.
DANNY BOOME: They’re just really cool, little stories that when I’m going and trying to find a really cool restaurant to eat, I want to know that. I want to know that there’s been a bit of care and attention put into the dish that’s in front of me.
And seasonality especially is where it all really does lie. It’s really becoming the heartbeat I think. It all regress back to understanding where our food comes from, but it also regress back to knowing well seasonally your pantry. We know that, “Let’s use what we’ve got and let’s not push the boat out any further in any other way.”
DEBRA: Well, that’s the way everybody used to eat before – I mean, if you go back, it used to be they grow their food in their gardens, they had a cow out back, they lived in village, they had their cottage gardens and people traded with each other. It wasn’t about food being shipped in from all these different places, the plates they ate off really were made by the local potter.
And so we’re just kind of going back to what’s natural. I think that it’s really incredible that these restaurants are doing that and setting these kinds of examples.
I wanted to ask you, first of all, where are you from.
DANNY BOOME: Well, my canny accent is from England. I’m from the U.K. originally.
DEBRA: I love England.
DANNY BOOME: But I’ve been out in the States for 10 years now. My beautiful wife and my beautiful son, we’ve actually just moved back for the winter. We were living in New York for eight years and we moved to Washington D.C. for the last two years. And then this winter, we moved back to Europe because we’re just opening our own culinary academy here.
DEBRA: Oh, great!
DANNY BOOME: Yeah, which is a really cool project itself.
DEBRA: Good, good. And how did…
DANNY BOOME: …because we’re doing a…
DEBRA: Go ahead, go ahead.
DANNY BOOME: Oh, sorry. Yeah, what we’re trying to do here in Europe is – well, I class myself as what they call a ‘gastronaut’. The idea is that I’ve developed what they call the ‘gastronaut academy’. It’s basically foodie adventures. And that’s what we’re going to be doing through Europe from January through to March. I’m basically taking people on a food tour, but with an extreme element.
I always say it’s like James Bond and Audrey Hepburn when they’re on vacation. That’s the vacation I’d like to go on – with a little bit of sophistication and a little bit of excitement. And then mixed up with food, we’re going sight-seeing, we’re doing these great, big detours around Italy, we’re going to great vineyards, like 16th and 14th century vineyards and wineries and then going to a couple of great [inaudible 00:10:11] restaurant.
So it’s going to be like Good Food Europe. You could think of it like that as well as Good Food America.
DEBRA: Wow! That’s really great. Well, we need to go to break in just a few seconds, but when we come back, what I’d like to talk about is I’d like you to tell us more about organic and sustainable and how those things are different and how they play out in the restaurants and maybe a little bit about what’s wrong with restaurants.
DANNY BOOME: Okay.
Debra: What should we be watching out for if we go to a restaurant?
DANNY BOOME: Okay.
DEBRA: So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Danny Boome. He is the host of the new show, Good Food America. He also was on ABC Daytime’s Recipe Rehab. He was the host. He was the host of Donut Showdown on the Food Network’s The Cooking Channel. And so you’ve probably seen him if you watch cooking channels like I do. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Danny Boome. He is the host of the new show, Good Food America where he goes and visits back in the kitchens with organic, sustainable and healthy restaurants across America.
So I want to tell you how you can watch it. It might be on your local channel line-up, but the show is produced by ZLiving. If you go to their website, you can watch the show.
It’s got kind of a long URL. So just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for Danny’s description of it in today’s show and you’ll see there’s a picture of the Good Food America logo and right next to it is the URL. You can just click on the link and it goes straight to the page on the ZLiving website where you can watch the shows.
There’s a little trailer you can watch. You can watch a little bit of the videos. And then they’ll ask you to sign in for free. Just log in and you can watch the whole video. It’s just delightful. I am so happy that you’re doing this.
Although I have to say this is the show I wanted to do, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do this show too.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah!
DEBRA: I mean, if you were to say to me, “What would be your dream vacation?”, I would say, “Oh, I’d like to go travel around the country and eat at all the organic restaurants.”
DANNY BOOME: And the funny thing is you don’t really have to travel anymore to do it because there’s so many around you.
DEBRA: There are, there are.
DANNY BOOME: I’m going to say I am the luckiest guy for all the shows that I’ve done from The Food Network to ABC to ZLiving. I’m very lucky. I get to travel and eat and link.
The thing is, obviously, if it’s your passion and what you wanted to do [inaudible 00:15:38]. The movement is that I also think that it’s actually becoming second nature now. I’m really encouraged that if people want to see this type of show, they want to hear about the who, the what, the why’s and where to find the purveyors, the restaurateurs, the – It’s really nice. It’s not a fad. I think everybody is just very ‘word for the wise’ of where we’re going with food and everybody is actually marching to the same beat and that’s a really positive step.
And this show, I really do this – I mean, season one, we got Emmy-nominated. For season two, I hope we go for it again because people are very aware that this type of information is needed. It’s also entertaining.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. It is. And it’s luscious. Well, I’m not going to talk about what I’ve already seen until we get later in the show. Let’s just talk about – there are some very yummy-looking things. And I’ll also tell you what I had for breakfast later.
But tell us about what you saw in terms of what’s the difference between organic and sustainable. Let’s just start there.
DANNY BOOME: Okay! The broad explanation of organic is that when you look at, say, organic, if arable or animal, organic is that we’ve let the – say if it’s on an arable side, on the agricultural side, basically, the land has been left to run free for five years to become toxic-free. And then obviously, the product that’s been developed is grown or raised in a non-toxic environment. That’s what organic means.
Sustainable is more about the sustainability of life and the environment. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to obviously lower the carbon footprint and we’re also trying to be more – like renew energy, renew products, repurpose. But then also, time and sustainability, it’s trying to farm responsibility.
It’s very interesting [inaudible 00:18:00] about the trout farming in Detroit. These guys, they grow lettuce on the top of their fish tank and the fish eat the roots. They’re in these massive tanks. If you can imagine this massive tank with a bed of salad, a bed of lettuce on the top, the fish eat the root of the lettuce. Then basically, the fish poop and the methane of the poop run the filtration system and the energy. And then the water sprinkles back on top and feeds the lettuce.
So it’s this kind of like really, really cool…
DEBRA: It is a really cool system.
DANNY BOOME: …and that’s sustainability.
DEBRA: It’s a system, yeah.
DANNY BOOME: I’m a bit of a science geek as well. So that was like I walked in and I went, “Oh, my God! This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” But also, it’s very interesting how many restaurants serves this where they’re, “I’m going to go buy my product from this guy” because there’s not then a strain on the fisheries.”
I mean, fresh water fish, it’s not possibly one of the most common things that we look at when we buy fish, but there’s not a strain on the – and also then, you’re not talking like – I call it ‘[inaudible 00:19:17] farmers’ when you’re talking about [inaudible 00:19:18] farming because a lot of the fish these days, they can be farmed so they can be any color that you want because they put a food dye or a feeding coloring.
So you have to look out for real organic. So that’s where the organic comes from. What is this fish or what is this cow fed? And basically, that’s what we’re looking for.
So organic and sustainable lives in harmony in my respect, it’s what I generally think of. And when we are going to meet some of these restaurants, what you find is that a lot of the guys, they go and meet a farmer.
Basically, they go to a farmer’s market, I meet a guy and I go, “Hey!” There’s actually more of a personal connection, more of a personal rapport between the farmer and the chef than actually the chef needs.
And then it’s sort of like, “I like this guy. I like his vision. I like how he’s growing it. He respects the earth. He respects the animal. He respects that I need – you know, I’m going to put an order in for 20 [inaudible 00:20:20] pounds of potatoes a year. But I also know that that guy is really crafting the land.” I mean, it’s such a responsible thing.
DEBRA: It is.
DANNY BOOME: And that’s the strange thing with organic. I don’t think people understand the cost element. If you go to Whole Foods today and you look in conventional and you look in the organic, there’s always a price difference. But the price difference is actually that there’s a little bit more sweat that goes into that and because the chemical that they’re using, the feeds they’re using or the time it’s taken the land, sort of the hit ratio of gaining a good product is a lot lower than actually [inaudible 00:21:05] because they’re more of a cosmetic product.
So you’re looking at oranges. I mean, you’re there in Clearwater, Florida so you’re not too far away from some orange groves. You’re looking at a taste of the ownership of that. You’re trying to split [inaudible 00:21:24].
What they’re doing in Europe is this…
DEBRA: Well, wait. I have to interrupt you. I have to interrupt you because we have to go to break.
DANNY BOOME: Alright, alright. Sorry, sorry, [inaudible 00:21:31].
DEBRA: Well, the commercial’s going to come and start talking right on top of you if I don’t. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Danny Boome and he obviously has a lot to say, so we’ll bring him back after the break. Stay tuned.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Danny Boome. He’s an internationally acclaimed TV personality and chef and the host of the new show, Good Food America.
It’s actually season two of Good Food America. He’s travelled through the country to find restaurants that are organic, sustainable and healthy and taking us behind-the-scenes in the kitchens.
You can go watch him, watch the show. If it’s not on your local line-up, you can watch it on the ZLiving website. Go to my website, ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and I’ve got the link right there. So all you have to do is just click through. Well, it’s kind of a long URL.
DANNY BOOME: It kind of is, right? We got to get a bit.ly on that.
DEBRA: Yes, something that’s easy to remember like ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. It’s very easy to remember.
DANNY BOOME: But I thought ZLiving.com was actually quite a catchy URL.
DEBRA: It is. But this one, it’s ZLiving.com/tvshows/good-food-america. Now, I bet you, nobody’s going to remember what I just said.
DANNY BOOME: Or they can just go…
DEBRA: So that’s why you can just go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and get it.
DANNY BOOME: Or you can just go to ZLiving.com and go search Danny Boome and I’ll pop up. So there we go, Good Food America.
DEBRA: Oh, that’s true. That’s true, yeah.
DANNY BOOME: Sundays at 9, right? Are we finished?
DEBRA: Yeah. Okay! So now, everybody knows how to get it. So did you want to finish your sentence or shall we talk about something else?
DANNY BOOME: No! Sorry, my train of thought was as we were talking about – sorry, I get a little bit (if you can tell) passionate when we start talking about organic, sustainability and everything.
DEBRA: Yes, you do.
DANNY BOOME: And what the interesting thing that I was just about to get into was that we pay a little bit too much attention to the cosmetics of how our products look.
DEBRA: Yes, talk about that.
DANNY BOOME: And so we sometimes go, “Well, that’s an ugly fruit. I’d rather have a pretty apple in front of an ugly apple.” They’re still an apple, but we’re tasting with our eyes. It’s the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just ugly.
What happens is that across the country – people don’t probably understand this, but say we go to an apple orchard and the apples are picked, those apples are graded from A to D. A obviously is then taken off to premiere supermarkets, B is then taken off to lower level supermarkets, then C is then put into things like pies and things like that and then D’s, they’re made into baby food.
And what it is, there’s nothing wrong actually with the apple itself. It’s just the “would people buy? Is it attractive enough?” And that’s [inaudible 00:29:36]. They basically put the cold medic and the organic. But actually, devalues the organic. The organic was ugly. It was ugly and oversized and not uniform-looking.
So if you can imagine a carrot, as we know, the carrot, well, sometimes the carrot will come out looking turnips or basically dog legs and things like that. So what it’s worth, they said, “Look, it’s still the same thing. But we’ll give you the ugly version for ¢5 cheaper on the pound.” And people just went, “Oh, okay.” That’s how they got organic in France.
So it was a case of, “Look, you can either have the conventional that is” – they actually make the conventional product more expensive just to say, “Look, this still is a carrot. Let’s start taking those off. Let’s start get moving ourselves away from the cosmetics because that costs us money. We’ll give you an uglier product, but it’s still the same thing and it’s a little bit cheaper.”
And that literally went off the shelves. The education process is, “Okay! It tastes the same. We can cook it the same. It just looks a little bit different.” It was kind of an amazing experiment. That’s what I’m trying to get to.
DEBRA: I love hearing that, yeah. I think that organic food tastes outstandingly better and I enjoy having it all look different. I like to go to the farmer’s market and I used to get my food from community-supported agricultural farm or organic farm that was actually down the street from where I live. I could go work in the farm and help put the baskets together and all those kinds of things and I love that.
I don’t care about how it looks. It looks its own unique way. Now, each vegetable is its own unique thing. Every carrot doesn’t have to look the same.
DANNY BOOME: Think of children. Children don’t realize. I mean, when you put something in front of a child these days, they don’t actually realize what is what because they’re losing that. We’re already three steps away from the next generation not understanding what is a leek or what is phenol or what is broccoli. They don’t know the difference, they just know it’s green.
DEBRA: Right!
DANNY BOOME: So that’s one step. The other step is as adults, we always think, “Well, it looks good and so that’s what we must buy because it looks the best.” But actually, it’s the color, it’s the dirt. That’s what you want. You want something that’s vibrant in color and a little bit of dirt on it because you know where it comes from. It shouldn’t be pristine and cropped and packaged. It should be loose and wild like my women.
DEBRA: Yes, yes!
DANNY BOOME: So that’s the way it goes. My publicist, if she’s just heard that, I’d be falling flat on the ground, but yeah.
DEBRA: She’s listening, Danny.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah. But no, that’s how we got to look at things. We go to remember that we used to run the land. We used to grow our own things in our back garden. It might sound like we’re beating the drum and I know I’m in Toxic Free Talk Radio, so everyones is on the same mindscape of what we should do with products. We just have to know that we can find it and that’s why we’re going to these restaurants. We can find it. These guys are doing the research for it.
They are introducing their customers to the CSA. They are introducing their customers to the farmers. So it’s not just, “Come and eat in our restaurant.” It’s also, “This is a Bob. He’s a great farmer. Why don’t you go down the road on a Sunday and buy your groceries from him or go join his CSA and pick up your weekly groceries or fruit and vegetables on a Wednesdays and get your share.” That’s the beautiful thing about this.
DEBRA: Well, one of the things that I think is great about restaurants, I mean I think if you look back in history, restaurants probably started because people were traveling and they couldn’t make their own food and so some enterprising housewife set up – I don’t know what the history of restaurants are, but that’s what it looks like to me.
But anyway, today, most people can make their food or buy take-out or whatever. But I think one of the great roles that restaurants are playing now (especially the restaurants that you visited) is that they are showing us a new way of eating – ”new” at least for our culture here.
By going to a restaurant and being able to see it and taste it and smell it, it’s not just like some strange, “What do I do with this food?”, that you see it in the store, that you’re actually seeing it in a dish, you’re tasting it and you’re saying, “This is delicious. Where does this come from?” and that having chefs set these new examples is really important.
We need to go to break again, but when we come back, I want us to talk about and give us some examples of some of the places that you visited and what you ate there and I want to tell you what I had for breakfast.
DANNY BOOME: Okay!
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I know I’ve said that twice. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m here with chef and TV host, Danny Boome. We’re talking about his new show, Good Food America. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Danny Boome, internationally acclaimed TV personality and chef and host of the new show, Good Food America on ZLiving.com.
You can just go to ZLiving.com and search on Danny Boome, search on Good Food America and find the show or you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click right on the link directly.
DANNY BOOME: And if you’re on ZLiving and you want to know what Danny Boome looks like, I’m the chef who hosts Good Food America with hair. Season one, I have no hair. Season two, chef has hair. That’s me. So that helps.
DEBRA: I know! And there’s also a very cute picture of him at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
DANNY BOOME: There is, yes! Yes.
DEBRA: Yes! Okay, so what I want to ask you – first, I’m going to tell you what I had for breakfast because I think that this actually belongs on the menu at some restaurant.
DANNY BOOME: Okay. I was going to say should I have been warned about this because I didn’t know you were going to do this?
DEBRA: No, no. But would you just listen? Yeah. I just want to share it with you.
DANNY BOOME: Okay, good.
DEBRA: So I had pumpkin pancakes…
DANNY BOOME: Ooh…
DEBRA: But they’re gluten-free pumpkin pancakes. They’re so easy to make and they’re so delicious. I want to tell everybody that they can make them. It’s very easy.
You can just take one egg or two eggs (however many eggs you want). For every egg, you just beat it up like you’re making scrambled eggs. For every egg, you’d put in two tablespoons of pumpkin puree and a little cinnamon and you could put it in nutmeg or any of those nice pumpkin pie spices with it. And that’s it.
So then you just take about two tablespoons of this battery, mix it all up. Take two tablespoons and make this little, tiny pancake. And it is so delicious. You would think that it would just be flat like eggs, but it pops up and it looks like a pancake and it tastes like a pancake. It actually has texture like a pancake. I was just so amazed because it was so easy and so healthy. I just think it’s the perfect autumn breakfast.
DANNY BOOME: Awesome!
DEBRA: Doesn’t that sound good?
DANNY BOOME: It sounds like you’ve got autumn in a pancake.
DEBRA: Yes.
DANNY BOOME: I’m just thinking fall is here and all those beautiful smells through the kitchen in the morning. I mean, you don’t need a famous Starbucks coffee during the week to start the morning off when you have that going on.
And also, as it’s gluten-free and as it’s pumpkin, it’s full of vitamins, it’s full of energy, antioxidants. And then, because it’s not glutened and heavy, it’s going to be really, really light and empower you through the day. And that’s the gorgeous thing about that. That’s amazing.
DEBRA: Yes, and I’m so…
DANNY BOOME: I went through a couple of places that served very similar things. I’ll tell you one place that you got to try on our journey. It’s a place called Green in San Antoni, Texas.
DEBRA: I’ve been to Green. In San Francisco?
DANNY BOOME: Yeah. Oh, no, no. These guys are in San Antonio.
DEBRA: Oh okay, different Green, go ahead.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah, yeah. Well, these guys are purely vegan/vegetarian. The funny thing is their claim to fame was their family – and you may have seen this on like [inaudible 00:42:23] Food or anything like that. Their family, the family in San Antonio that owned the café or the diner or deli, they have the world’s biggest cannabin. They went from serving basically coffee and donuts and Cinnibon to – they said they had a whole conscious point in their life where they wanted to live healthier. So they sold the business and they started this – basically, what I call it is a vegetarian/vegan diner.
All the food is organic and sustainably bought, but it’s diner food. So they still had [inaudible 00:43:01] and they still had pancakes, but they source everything and created alternatives. And some of the dishes, you won’t even know they were different. It’s just amazing!
But [inaudible 00:43:14] there’s a place like that at every corner you’ve heard. That’s the gorgeous thing when you’re on this food discovery.
DEBRA: If you’re really looking around – I mean, I know that when I go to a new city, I’m looking for – no, I’m not eating in the chain restaurants. I’m looking for these little kind of restaurants like you’re going to. I’m always looking for them. I look for them online before I go to a new city. And I’m sure going to be looking at your list. And so when I go to a city, I’ll look up those restaurants.
But it’s just so interesting. I get ideas about things to eat and things that I can make at home by going to restaurants.
DANNY BOOME: Absolutely, yeah.
DEBRA: That’s why I like to go to restaurants, I get inspired. And when you go to a restaurant, you eat things that you wouldn’t make at home.
So tell us about – well, I want to tell people about the kale burger. Tell people about the kale burger because they can watch eating-prepared on ZLiving.com.
DANNY BOOME: So that was a restaurant, Cedar Point in Philadelphia. And also, the one thing that you’ve just hit upon is actually just the simplicity of some of these dishes. It’s so quick and it’s so easy. You just throw it in a blender and make it there and then. It’s just the compliment that you have to basically build around.
But the kale burger was just really easy. If I remember, it was just cannellini beans, kale and egg and that was it.
DEBRA: Sage, sage.
DANNY BOOME: It was thrown together. Sorry?
DEBRA: Sage. I just watched it this morning, sage.
DANNY BOOME: And that. Well, can you imagine, I went to 76 different restaurants and each restaurant, we had three dishes? So you’re going to have to bear with me because sometimes, I’m going to miss an ingredient.
DEBRA: Totally fine, I would too.
DANNY BOOME: Actually, the hash was the amazing thing that they had there. They called it slame or hash because it was in a hipster area. I think it was really, really clever because it was beet root squash and sweet potatoes all sautéed together on a pan. It looked absolutely fantastic with a [inaudible 00:45:36] thing on the top. Ah, it was amazing.
DEBRA: Mm-hmmm, it looked really good. It looked really good.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah, but the kale burger was something that I’d never thought of either because it was like, “Wow! Kale is so versatile.” We all use it in salads and what-not, but actually, you then starting putting it into a burger and using it in that sense, now that is kind of cool.
DEBRA: I thought so too. I’m going to try that.
DANNY BOOME: Yeah, you got to. It really, really –
I mean, the interesting thing was Philadelphia, to say, as a city was one of the most [inaudible 00:46:10] cities I went to. My wife and I actually went the week after we had shot there. We were in D.C. We went to a concern. And the major thing was, we spent a couple of days, we spent a weekend there and the amount of organic, sustainable restaurants that were there, it was just so much easier to find.
DEBRA: Yes.
DANNY BOOME: It was so easy to find some of the really “clean” food as I like to call it. And that was just one place. That was in a [inaudible 00:46:44] neighborhood. When you went further into town in the Gayborhood, say that area in the gay quarter, there was veg.
That was like doing high-end – I mean, literally, high-end white tablecloth vegetarian/vegan food. Not one piece of meat was on the menu. And they were doing carrots six ways. I didn’t even know you can do carrots six ways. Obviously, my imagination has been stretched now since I’ve been to that restaurant.
But these guys, people are pushing the envelope. They’re playing with spices, they’re playing with their ingredients and it’s amazing what we’re coming up with.
DEBRA: Yes, so much so.
DANNY BOOME: Increasingly, I didn’t expect to find that – I mean, for that one weekend that Megan and I went to, we basically found 12 different restaurants that we haven’t even researched. We just stumbled across them. We weren’t even looking for them.
And that’s in Philadelphia, which is kind of a blue-collared town. But then we went to Colorado, we went to Denver and boy! We turn every corner and there’s an organic restaurant.
So the finger is on the pulse. It’s nice to know that you don’t have to look sometimes. That I think is my message on that one.
DEBRA: Well, I’m sorry to say that there are not many organic restaurants in Clearwater, Florida. [inaudible 00:48:06] to come down here. I mean, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area, so I started eating in Chez Panisse 30 years ago and Green in San Francisco.
And so when I first started becoming – I mean, I grew up on [inaudible 00:48:23]. But when I started becoming an adult and living on my own, I just started exploring food. And while the world was learning about all the things that were going on in Brookline, California with the food scene, I was right in the middle of that. I was eating in all those restaurants.
And when I came here to Florida where that hasn’t been going on and I started cooking the way I learned from eating in restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, people, they just fell over and then people introduced me as the best cook in Clearwater, Florida because just the difference the way people still think here in this part of the country is very different than in those cities.
I’m going to have to say that we have less than a minute left.
DANNY BOOME: No, that was the quickest hour ever.
DEBRA: I know we could talk for hours and hours about this subject and I know that you have plenty to say, but thank you so much for being here. I know you’re calling from England, yes?
DANNY BOOME: Yes, right. Yeah, yeah. I’ll send you the bill…
DEBRA: So is it the middle of the night?
DANNY BOOME: No, no, no. It’s like six o’clock in the evening, don’t worry.
DEBRA: Okay, good, good. Well, thank you so much. Do you have any – I can give you ten seconds, any final words?
DANNY BOOME: The gastronaut wants you to watch Good Food America on ZLiving, 9 PM every Sunday for an amazing food journey across America. Keep it organic and keep it sustainable.
DEBRA: Excellent! Thanks so much for being with me. And I’m going to be watching, so I think all of you should watch because it’s excellent, just an excellent, excellent show.
DANNY BOOME: Good.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!
DANNY BOOME: Thank you. Bye bye.
DEBRA: Bye!
DANNY BOOME: Bye.
Living Fresh Collection
Beautiful all-natural bed linens that enhance your sleep experience, made from sustainable fabric. FRESH in the name stands for “Fabric Redefining Environmental Standard in our Home.” The fabric is Tencel-Plus, made from cotton and cellulose from eucalyptus trees, which makes the fabric resist dust mites naturally (I’ve slept on these sheets and they don’t smell like eucalyptus). All natural substances are used in processing raw materials into fibers.
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Listen to my interview with Living Fresh Collection National Sales Director Randi Farina. |
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Improve Your Sleep Experience With Sustainable Bed Linens
My guest today is Randi Farina, the National Sales Director of Living Fresh Collection, a new direct selling organization that focuses on sustainable bed linens. We’ll be talking about how natural bed linens enhance your sleep experience and how the Living Fresh Collection fabrics are made in a sustainable way. In 2013, Randi joined Living Fresh Collection to launch a company that would not only provide linens made with Tencel+Plus™ Lyocell (fibers from the eucalyptus tree) to enhance one’s sleep, but an opportunity to empower women by giving them the tools to own and operate their own business. After receiving her Bachelor of Art at the State University of New York, Randi started her career in 1994 with The Pampered Chef. As her business grew, the importance of providing support and mentorship to women became apparent in the success of her own organization. Her values of teamwork, personal development and achievement followed her throughout her career as her work continued with the United States Olympic Committee. Working as a licensee of the USOC, she created the first national fundraiser for the Vancouver Games. The US Olympic Team Rings Wristbands wore worn by Olympic athletes as well as fans all over the country. In 2010 Randi returned her focus to working with women as an Associate Producer for Lifetime Television’s morning show. She thrived on creating direct brand messaging to consumers, while being able to motivate women to find the very delicate balancing act between work and home life. In 2011 and 2012, Randi traveled with the Show on 10 City tours throughout the country meeting thousands of women and providing brands products & support so they could achieve their work/life balance. Returning to the direct sales industry, Randi feels as if her career has come full circle. By being able to provide support to entrepreneurial women as they grow their own businesses. Randi has found her work/life balance. Randi resides in Boca Raton, Florida with her husband and four children. www.LivingFreshCollection.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO Improve Your Sleep Experience with Sustainable Bed Linens
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd Guest: Randi Farina
Date of Broadcast: October 28, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Tuesday, October 29th 2014. It’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. I slept really well last night. How well did you sleep? Maybe you don’t know this, but bed sheets, most bed sheets (unless you are buying special bed sheets that don’t have this), most bed sheets have permanent press finishes on them, which are releasing formaldehyde. And even if you’ve washed your sheets many, many times, this resin, this permanent press resin stays on your sheets and continues to release formaldehyde for many years and formaldehyde causes insomnia.
So if you’re not sleeping well, you might consider changing your sheets. This is the subject that we’re going to be talking about today with my guest, bed linens. She has some very interesting bed linens that are made in a very sustainable way. And the whole idea of the company is about helping you sleep better.
I just want to say that I slept on these sheets last night and I slept really well, really, really well. They aren’t toxic at all.
But before we talk to the guest, I want to tell you that since the beginning of this show when I started in April of last year, of 2013, I wanted to transcribe the shows because each and every show has so much valuable information in it. I wanted you to be able to read it and save it in writing. It was difficult for me to find somebody who was reliable and accurate and affordable in order to make the transcriptions.
But I finally found somebody and I now have started transcribing all the live shows. Today, for the first time, I’ve posted the ones that I have. I have I think about 12 transcriptions now. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And on the sub-menu, it says ‘transcripts’. You can go to that page and you can read the transcripts of – I think last week, there’s all, but one. I have it. I just need to post it. A week before, there’s all of them. And there’s also some from the past.
And so today’s show will be transcribed, tomorrow’s, Thursday’s. All the live shows are being transcribed the week that they occur. So they can go every weekend to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find the transcripts for the week.
But I’m also working on transcribing all the back shows. So this is a great, big project. So go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, click on ‘transcripts’ and take a look because I’m really excited about them.
Okay! So now, we’re going to get to our guest. My guest today is Randi Farina. She’s the national sales director of The Living FRESH Collection, which is a new direct selling organization that focuses on sustainable bed linens.
Hi, Randi.
RANDI FARINA: Hi, Debra. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. I like your sheets.
RANDI FARINA: I’m so happy to hear that.
DEBRA: They aren’t toxic at all. When I spoke to you before, you told me I should wash them several times. I actually washed them many times before I slept on them. You told me that the more you wash them, the softer they get. And they did get softer and softer and softer. And I just went right to sleep and I slept all night. I have no problem with them at all.
RANDI FARINA: We’ve heard that from a lot of people. And we tell to wash the sheets prior not because there’s anything on them that we want off, but in the handling of all the packaging, we just want you to have the freshest experience. So right out of your washer is the freshest experience you can have.
DEBRA: Yes! And I use the laundry soap that you provide. It was just great! The whole experience was just great.
RANDI FARINA: I’m so happy to hear that. And you slept well?
DEBRA: I slept well. I slept very well. I woke up a couple of time (that’s typical for me), but I went right back to sleep. I was very comfortable and the sheets felt soft against my skin. I was just very happy, very happy.
RANDI FARINA: Great! Well, that’s what we’ve been hearing for many, many years, which made us want to bring them out to the residential arena because we’ve heard that story.
DEBRA: Well, tell us the story behind The Living FRESH Collection, how it came to be.
RANDI FARINA: Sure! Living FRESH Collection started – and let me just say that FRESH stands for ‘fabric redefining environmental standard in our home’. So Living FRESH sheets were actually sold to the hotels for the past eight years.
Our sister company, Valley Forge Fabrics started working with the hotels about eights years ago when the hotels really started getting into the sustainable aspect of not washing sheets unless the guest wanted them to, not washing towels unless the guest wanted to. The hotels were looking for a fiber that was more sustainable than cotton, yet still was able to hold up to the rigors of washing that hotels do, which is a lot more strenuous than the average person’s washing.
DEBRA: So tell us for a minute what’s not sustainable about cotton.
RANDI FARINA: Cotton is a fabulous fiber. We absolutely love it.Hopefully, people are growing it and farming it sustainably and environmentally friendly. Tencel+Plus, the fibers from Eucalyptus are above and beyond organic and they’re better than cotton in the respect that when cotton gets wet, it remains wet longer than Tencel+Plus.
So when you’re sleeping and you sweat at night (and everybody does sweat at night), cotton can remain wet. If you’re lying on it and it’s warm and it’s moist, bacteria can start to grow.
Tencel+Plus, we have studies that show us that it does dries faster than any other fiber out there. So it will dry faster than 100% cotton. Therefore, bacteria cannot grow on sheet.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Let’s go back to the story and then we’ll talk about the sheets.
RANDI FARINA: Okay, great! So the hotels wanted more of a sustainable fiber and something that was cleaner. So they started looking at bamboo and tencel and beechwood. They came to Valley Forge Fabrics who does a lot of their fabrics for upholstery and drapery and they said, “Do you do top of the bed?” We decided that we were going to start to create a sustainable fiber for hotels.
But in order for it to be used in hospitality, it has to withstand 160° of washing every single day. That’s difficult on the best of cotton.
So we went to the company and we said, “We love tencel. We love the fiber from eucalyptus. We just need something stronger that will last longer than 100% tencel or 100% cotton.”
So we created a proprietary fiber called Tencel+Plus. It is 52% cotton and 48% Tencel+Plus. It withstands the washing of everyday hospitality use and the drying. And the hotels absolutely loved it. It creates a cleaner sleep environment if these bacteria cannot grow on it. And then what a lot of the listeners don’t know yet is that eucalyptus is actually resistant to dust mites.
DEBRA: Oh, I didn’t know that.
RANDI FARINA: Yup, naturally. We do not have to put any chemicals in our sheets whatsoever to keep away the dust mites. And the dust mites are so important to be kept out of your bedroom because that’s what causes most allergens. If anybody is waking up with congestion or a cough or itchy nose or throat or red eyes, it very well could be because they are allergic or even sensitive to dust mite.
Cotton will not repel dust mites. Eucalyptus+, Tencel+Plus, eucalyptus fibers will repel up to 95% of dust mite survival. So it’s naturally resistant.
DEBRA: You know, I did notice sleeping on the sheets that they – because I sleep on cotton flannel every day of the year because they’re so soft and they are absorb perspiration better than – and moving here in Florida, even on very sweaty nights, it’s more comfortable to sleep on flannel than it is to sleep on a cotton percale sheet.
But I did notice that it just seemed like sleeping on these sheets was less dusty. Not that I’m even aware of my sheets being dusty, but I do know with my cotton sheets that as I wash them, the fabric just kind of starts thinning out until it just rips and it doesn’t stay.
So I know that there is something coming off the cotton sheets, but there was just like nothing. It was just soft and clean.
RANDI FARINA: Yup!
DEBRA: Soft and clean.
RANDI FARINA: Yup, that’s exactly right. And another great point – and we’re also based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, eucalyptus, if you’ve ever smelt it – Debra, have you ever smelled eucalyptus?
DEBRA: Oh, yeah. I used to live in California where we had eucalyptus trees all over the place.
RANDI FARINA: Fabulous! It actually draws the moisture away from your skin and it has that menthol smell to it, that menthol, which actually will draw the moisture away from the skin. Our sheets do the exact same thing.
DEBRA: We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll continue. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Randi Farina. She’s the national sales director of The Living FRESH Collection. You can go to her website at LivingFRESHCollection.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randi Farina. She’s the national sales director of the Living FRESH Collection, which is a new direct selling organization that focuses on sustainable bed linens. Their website is LivingFRESHCollection.com.
Okay, Randi, so I want to interject that even though these sheets are made out of eucalyptus, for anybody who smelled the eucalyptus tree who thinks, “Oh, no! My bed is going to smell like eucalyptus,” the sheets don’t actually smell like eucalyptus.
RANDI FARINA: No.
DEBRA: I can’t say that they’re completely without any kind of – I don’t know which word to use here, not ‘scent’, not ‘odor’, not ‘fragrance’. I don’t want to use any word that might sound derogatory. I can smell something, but it’s not a overpoweringly eucalyptus. It just smells more like just kind of a neutral wood-ishness. But I have an extremely sensitive nose and it didn’t bother me at all. I just went, “Oh, there’s just a little something there.”
But I had no problem with it at all. There’s nothing toxic about it. It’s not like something that’s scented or something that has a formaldehyde finish, not like that at all. It was just very pleasant. It doesn’t smell overpoweringly of eucalyptus. It didn’t even remotely remind me of eucalyptus.
Well, we’re going to talk about how these sheets are made later, but I just wanted to mention that since she said it was made from eucalyptus. I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea and stop listening because they think that the sheets smell like eucalyptus.
RANDI FARINA: They don’t. They smell clean.
DEBRA: They smell clean. They smell very clean. Yes, they do.
Okay! So tell us more about the sheets. Let’s just start talking about what the sheets are made from, how they’re made because I know that tencel, Lyocell, that you have a particular way of making these, so that they don’t contain the toxic chemicals that some other similar types of fabrics use toxic chemicals like some of the bamboos.
We should probably say that Lyocell, tencel is similar to what people know as Rayon where – I’ll just give a little background here. And then you can tell the details. Rayon and tencel are made from cellulose, bits of cellulose that are then processed in a certain way to turn it into a fiber.
Now, the difference here, if you have cotton, for example, is that cotton has a cellulose, but cotton, it’s like a cotton ball. It really is like a cotton ball in the plant. And so it’s pulled apart, the cotton ball is pulled apart and then it’s spun into a thread, but there’s actually a fiber there.
The difference here with Rayon and tencel is they take wood cellulose to make these. In most cases, it’s a wood. And then, they break it down into little bits of cellulose, which then gets mixed into array and extruded into a thread instead of there being a fiber.
And so what’s unique and sustainable about this particular one is that they have a very non-toxic process.
So Randi, I want you to just explain, give us a really good picture of what this fiber is from the beginning, from the three to the sheets.
RANDI FARINA: Sure. Well, we only take our eucalyptus fibers from FSA-protected forest. We don’t have a farm. We go straight to FSA-protected forest. They can tell us exactly how much we can cut down. And the only thing that is used to help grow the eucalyptus trees is water and sunshine. So there’s no chemicals used in the production or the growing of the trees.
We cut the tree down about ten inches from their root, which allow them to grow back to full maturity in five to eight years.
DEBRA: I’ll add that eucalyptus is a very fast-growing tree.
RANDI FARINA: Yes, yeah, absolutely.
DEBRA: I grew up with eucalyptus trees.
RANDI FARINA: There you go! We use the pulp of the tree. So there are also people out there that have asked us, “I’m allergic to eucalyptus oil. Can I still sleep on your sheet?” and the answer is yes.
So we use the pulp of the tree and we boil it down with water. We actually push it through a strainer. I’m going to give you a very vivid picture. I tell everybody to picture a very large sourhead and we push the wood pulp through a strainer in order to get the pulp, which actually is a paper pulp. When it comes out on the other side, it’s just like a paper pulp.
We take that paper pulp and we mix it with one organic solvent. The name of the solvent is NNMO. It’s organic. It looks like honey. It can actually be drunk. We mix it together to create our fibers.
At our Sleep Wellness Shows (and we do presentations introducing people to Living FRESH collection), we have a small box. It’s called our ‘create a textile box’. We actually passed it around so you can see and feel and touch the pulp of the eucalyptus wood chip, we show you the next process, which is the paper pulp. And then we show you the finished result, which is our Tencel+Plus fibers derived from the eucalyptus. We pass it around and it looks like cotton. It has more of a sheen to it and it also is much softer. So I tell people, “It looks like cotton, but it feels like cashmere.” From those fibers, we are able to get our thread, which we mix 52% cotton and 48% Tencel+Plus to weave our actual linen.
You had said earlier that this goes around another process. People ask this question all the time, Debra and I would like to bring it to everyone’s attention because everyone knows bamboo is a very sustainable fiber because it grows fast as well. And we love bamboo tables, bamboo vases. But when you take bamboo and you break it down into a fiber, they use 13 toxic chemicals to do so in their process to create the Viscose Rayon as opposed to our one organic solvent that we use, which makes Tencel+Plus sheets much more sustainable. And also, because our Tencel+Plus sheets are made for the hospitality industry, much more durable.
A lot of times, even sometimes with cotton, when you take their sheets out of the dryer, you’ll notice that the dryer fills with lint. Nobody really wonders where that came from, but you had said like you didn’t feel any dust in the bedroom. All that lint and all that dust is actually your fibers breaking down.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. I know! Even now, every time I wash my cotton flannel sheets, I get a lot of lint in the dryer. And there was no lint from these sheets. I will tell you, there was no lint from these sheets. It was really quite amazing.
RANDI FARINA: Great!
DEBRA: We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Randi Farina, the national sales director of the Living FRESH Collection. You can visit their website at LivingFRESHCollection.com. They have more information there about all the things we were just talking about, about how the product is made. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randi Farina. She’s the national sales director of the Living FRESH Collection, a new direct selling organization that focuses on sustainable bed linens. Their website is LivingFRESHCollection.com.
So Randi, I know that one of the things about your bed linens in addition to the way they’re produced is that they create a healthier sleep environment. I’m really interested in that because sleep is so important to health for so many reasons. But my particular interest is that your body needs to sleep in order for it to detox toxic chemicals. If people are having difficulties sleeping, that means that their detox function is not working to the optimum.
And also, if anybody is trying to lose weight, you need to sleep in order for your body to lose weight. That’s just a known thing about weight loss. And there’s so many other things. I mean, you just can’t concentrate or work well or all these things if you don’t sleep well. And so tell us how these particular bed linens contribute to creating a healthy sleep environment.
RANDI FARINA: Sure, absolutely. I did not know that about detoxing, but we always say if you’re not resting and your body’s not rejuvenating during the night, then you’re not the best you can be the very next day.
DEBRA: Absolutely.
RANDI FARINA: And it’s interesting because in today’s world. Everybody’s doing everything correctly. They’re eating right, they’re working out. But how many of us are really considering our sleep environment? And that’s what the education that we’re trying to bring to everybody. For eight hours a day, you’re wrapping yourself in products that you probably aren’t giving much thought to. And for eight hours, if you give the thought and wrapped yourself in the best products, your body will be able to rest and rejuvenate.
So Tencel+Plus sheet as you’ve said at the very beginning are probably the softest, most luxurious sheet you can sleep on. Because of the eucalyptus fibers, they draw the moisture out of your body.
Most people wake up during the night from a tactile imbalance or a temperature imbalance. Most of us are either hot or cold and that may wake us up. The Tencel+Plus sheet will help you regulate the body temperature, they will draw the heat out of your body, when you do sweat (and like I said, everybody does, just some people sweat more than others when they sleep, which is probably a good thing if you’re detoxing), the sweat is absorbed by your sheet.
Tencel+Plus will draw the moisture to the center of the sheet, it’ll absorb it quicker, but it will also release faster than any other fiber. One hundred percent cotton or cotton poly or Rayon or silk will remain wet. And that’s a lot of reason why people wake up. If you just set a poll and say, “Are you cold or are you hot at night?”, most people say they’re both. That’s because the sweat makes them hot, but then the cooling off of the sweat lying on their bodies makes them cold again.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve experienced that. It’s always I’m either putting the covers on or taking the covers off.
RANDI FARINA: …which wakes people up at night. Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s exactly what the Tencel+Plus sheet will allow you, to regulate your body temperature. You will still sweat at night, but not as much because you’re going to be able to breathe better. And then if you do sweat, it’ll absorb the moisture and wick away from your body and then release it quicker.
When we first came out, we had a great amount of testimonials. They’re all on our website and I invite everybody to come read them. But a lot of times, we were hearing from menopausal women who swore they no longer were sweating at night after sleeping on our sheet. And when I asked them to write the testimonial, they said, “Well, let me just double-check and make sure,” they put their old sheets back on and the next day, they would call and say, “Okay, it’s definitely your sheet. I will write you a testimonial.”
DEBRA: Oh, wow!
RANDI FARINA: We have a young mom up in the Seattle, Washington area who was done with wake-up crying every night. His pajamas were soaking wet because he would sweat so much. So again, it’s not just menopausal women who were sweating a lot.
She changed his bedding. We do have everything from the encasement for a crib all the way up to [inaudible 00:30:46]. He was no longer waking up. And because of that, he wasn’t waking crying in the middle of the night from being wet, he was sleeping through the night and so was his mother was sleeping through the night. So it was helping everybody to get that rest that they so desperately need.
DEBRA: That’s great. That’s great. I just know how good it feels for me to have a good night’s sleep. I know many, many years ago when I first started (like 30 years ago when I started discovering about toxic chemicals), I remember I used to have insomnia. All night, I would not be able to sleep and then I’d be exhausted in the morning. This just went on week after week after week. It was very hard for me to sleep. And then when I started doing research into toxic chemicals and I found that formaldehyde on the bedsheets causes insomnia, I said, “Oh, my God! I’m going to get rid of these polyester cotton sheets.” And at that time, it was very difficult to find a 100% cotton sheet. But I found the one brand that was available and I changed my sheets. That very night, I slept. It just really made a difference.
And so I’ve been telling people for 30 years that if you can’t sleep, switch away from the polyester cotton with the formaldehyde finish and go to a cotton sheet with no finish on it.
RANDI FARINA: Yeah, it makes a world of difference.
DEBRA: It does, it does. And it sounds like this is really a whole new type of bed linen that hasn’t existed before. It has even more benefits.
RANDI FARINA: It has a lot of health benefits. Just sleeping well has a lot of health benefits. We’ve heard study after study of high blood pressure, diabetes, you had mentioned obesity, people not sleeping well, their hormones are not regulating if they are not sleeping well. There’s one study that we’ve heard out of Stanford, California about people who were doing a study on what causes depression. They were able to keep people up at night, sleep deprive them and they were able to basically get them to have every symptom that a depressed person to have. The conclusion was how many of us are depressed and overwhelmed in life and how many of us really just need a good night sleep?
DEBRA: I think probably everybody is not sleeping well. I know that’s a really broad statement. But between sleeping on formaldehyde sheets and drinking coffee and toxic things in your body and stress and worry, how many people really sleep well?
I know that it’s made a big difference for me to make sure that I sleep well, a big difference in my health. And yet I think that most people just think the way they sleep is average or normal and don’t really know what a really good night sleep is.
RANDI FARINA: Right! That’s the message that we’re trying to give around the country when we give our Sleep Wellness Shows. It’s to try to really educate people on creating a cleaner, healthier, more luxurious sleep environment and opening up their eyes to understanding, number one, how important sleep is and number two, how important it is to consider what you’re already sleeping in. So you make that cleaner and healthier, it’s just going to allow everyone to sleep better and then obviously, if we’re sleeping better, we’re going to be performing much better the very next day.
DEBRA: Yes, and happier. It just feels wonderful. It just feels wonderful when you’ve had a good night’s sleep and you wake up in the morning. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randi Farina. She is the national sales director Living FRESH Collection. You can find out more at the LivingFRESHCollection.com and when we come back after the break.
DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Randi Farina. She’s the national sales director of Living FRESH Collection. Their website is LivingFRESHCollection.com.
Randi, I feel like I should play a lullaby for the music today.
DEBRA: To get everybody to sleep better.
RANDI FARINA: Get everybody to sleep better, yeah. So I have your catalog here and also, you have a printed catalog and you also have a website. I’m looking at your catalog. You have all kinds of different types of products made with tencel. And one of the things that I really like about the sheets that I have is that they’re just your basic, beautiful, clean, white sheets. But you also have them in colors and patterns. Just give us an idea the different kinds of products that you sell.
RANDI FARINA: Sure, everything that we make is made with Tencel+Plus. We start off at the very first layer of what you should be covering your mattress with and that’s a 100% Tencel+Plus, 100% bed bug resistant and dust mite resistant encasement.
People don’t really understand, but mattresses do double their weight in eight years if not protected. And just imagine if your body is sweating and your mattress is soaking in that sweat, it could act like a sponge. Bacteria could grow inside. So the most important thing…
DEBRA: Especially if you have a natural fiber mattress. I just want to interject that because a lot of people, they’ll switch from a polyurethane mattress, the synthetic mattress and then they’ll go to natural mattress and that’s one of the things, one of the drawbacks of a natural mattress. It’s natural, it’s biodegradable. It absorbs water. It can grow bacteria. They do need to protect their mattress.
RANDI FARINA: Yeah.
DEBRA: I just want to clarify that a mattress encasement, that goes all the way around the mattress and then zippered.
RANDI FARINA: Correct.
DEBRA: And so if you’re concerned about bed bugs or those things, then you should have a mattress encasement and that’s different from a mattress pad, which you also have.
RANDI FARINA: Correct. Our encasement actually has a [inaudible 00:41:06] lock on it, which is patented so it’s very easy for a human to open, but it can’t be opened. The bed bugs will stay out of it and bacteria will stay in or out depending on where it is.
After that, we do have a fabulous mattress pad, again, made with the Tencel+Plus. Our mattress pad has a full covering, so it looks like a sheet, but the top is very well padded to give you that extra layer of comfort.
We have our sheet set. And like you said, Debra, we started off with white and ivory. And just this past month, we released two wonderful colors, silver and denim. So those are our first two colors of the collection.
We have pillow protectors because the same thing that happens to your mattresses can happen with your pillows probably even more so from sweating and drooling. It’s important to cover your pillows. We make our own pillows and they are filled with Tencel+Plus as well. At least 30% Tencel+Plus will make them dust mite resistant, so our products are also hypoallergenic.
We also just launched two great towels. We have a spa collection, which is wonderful, white, soft and cozy, which is 70% cotton and 30% Tencel+Plus so it drives faster. It also uses less water and less drying time to clean the towel. My favorite product is our Mediterranean towel, which is original Turkish towel much thinner than a spa towel, but super absorbent. So if you can imagine that the eucalyptus draws the moisture away from your skin, imagine how absorbent it would make a towel. So that’s my one favorite.
DEBRA: And I’m looking at the picture of the Mediterranean towels. It’s very pretty. It’s got little tiny stripes, a little border of stripes and it’s got fringe, knotted fringe.
RANDI FARINA: And the fringe is not an ornament. The fringe is actually the thread that runs from the entire length of the towel and then knotted. So a lot of times, towel companies will just put on a pretty ornament and then they don’t actually wash well, but these fringes are the part of the towel. So in two years, three years, the towel will look just as beautiful as the very first day you got it.
We created a sleepwear collection, classic pajamas for women and boxers for men because people said how much they loved to wrap themselves in our sheets. We thought how fabulous to wrap yourself in our sheeting materials, so we created pajamas. We use the exact, same material, so they also get softer with each wash.
And then like you mentioned at the very beginning of this show, we did a laundry detergent for no reason other than since our linens are natural and clean, we didn’t want any residues left. You probably know a lot about what would go into a detergent. So we used an all-natural, no synthetic fragrances or dyes to create it.
There is a scent made from the eucalyptus oil. It’s a eucalyptus aloe scent going into the washing machine, but no scent at all left on the sheet.
DEBRA: And I will vouch for that. I will vouch for that. And the thing about scent is that natural fragrances like essential oils, they will tend to wash out and disappear.
In fact, here’s a little non-historic fact. The first synthetic fragrance perfume was made by Coco Chanel, the famous designer. The reason that she wanted a synthetic fragrance was because the fragrances women used then were all natural essential oils and they wouldn’t last throughout the evening.
And so Coco Chanel just happened to be there when they were making synthetic fragrances. Chanel no. 5 was the first synthetic fragrance. Those synthetic fragrances last and last and last and last. And so if you wash in detergent that has a synthetic fragrance, you’re not going to be able to get that out. I mean, really, you have to use other things to get the detergent out.
RANDI FARINA: Right! And we didn’t want any residue left on our linens.
DEBRA: So there’s none. There’s none. Your laundry detergent was totally fine.
RANDI FARINA: We also make wonderful duvet covers. Our duvet covers and our pillows are also machine washable and dryable, which you can’t say for a lot of other people or duvet covers out there, so they can create a cleaner, healthier, more luxurious sleep environment. To complete our entire collections, our shams that would go on top of the duvet cover that are beautiful and classic with a baratta stitch that complements the entire collection.
DEBRA: So people can order this on your website. But you also do parties. So tell us about those.
RANDI FARINA: We do, we do. We’re a direct sales company and we chose to go that route, so you won’t find our linens on any store shelves. You have to buy them exclusively through sleep consultants, Living FRESH Collection sleep consultants. We launched last July and we are now in 18 states.
So we go around the country and we do our Sleep Wellness parties. Some people call them Wine & Sheet Parties and serve some wonderful appetizers with it as well. But we’re not just about selling sheets. We are really about teaching people to create a cleaner, healthier sleep environment. And because we are a direct sales company, we are really able to keep the cost of the end user much lower than if we had to put it on shelves. And more importantly, we just want to be able to tell the story of why our sheets are different and why they really, really help you sleep better. We do that through our sleep consultants.
DEBRA: These really are sheets – I’ve said this before, but I’ll just say it again. These really are sheets unlike anything else that I’ve ever seen. They’re specifically designed, I would say just from looking at them, to have qualities that would help you sleep better rather than sheets of yesterday I guess.
I mean, I have nothing against a beautiful cotton sheet, but most sheets that you’re going to find on the store shelves are polyester cotton sheets with formaldehyde finishes on them and it certainly isn’t anything like this. Those sheets were designed around existing fibers and these sheets are designed with a particular purpose of how are we going to get a good sleep environment, how are we going to make a sheet that’s durable and purposes like that.
So that’s not something that you’re going to be able to put on a label and get people to understand by putting it in a store. It certainly is a new and interesting product and I’m glad that you did it.
Here’s another thing that I just wanted to mention. You have a USDA approval that it’s bio-based. Tell us about that.
RANDI FARINA: Yes, we are the only sheet company out there that is USDA certified bio based for both residential and hospitality use. We’re also the only sheet fabric out there that is fiber verified. Because our process is so soft, if you took our sheets and put them under a microscope, they can tell that they are eucalyptus. So they are fiber verified and USDA bio-based. Other sheets (for instance, bamboo sheets) cannot be fiber verified because they’ve gone through so many processes.
DEBRA: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
RANDI FARINA: So we are very proud of that certification.
DEBRA: I see what you’re saying. The eucalyptus quality, that actually, eucalyptus is still there and it can be seen through the microscope.
RANDI FARINA: That’s correct.
DEBRA: Well, thank you so much for being with us and explaining all of these, Randi. It’s very interesting. Again, the website is LivingFRESHCollection.com. We’ve got about 30 seconds. Any last thing you’d like to say?
RANDI FARINA: Yeah, I just want everybody to really understand how important it is to create a cleaner, healthier sleep environment so they can be the best possible person they can be.
DEBRA: Okay, good. Thank you.
RANDI FARINA: Thanks, Debra.
DEBRA: You’re welcome. So again, I want to mention as I did at the beginning of the show that all of the shows are now being transcribed so you can read this show as well as listen to it at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Just go there and look on the sub-menu for the transcripts page and click on ‘transcripts’. I already have about a dozen transcripts up from past shows I think and we’ll keep making the transcriptions so that you can have a written record of the valuable information that’s on each of these shows.
Again, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.
New Food Guides
From Debra Lynn Dadd
I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but today, two new food guides were released.
The first to come into my email inbox is the 2014 Good Food Org Guide, produced by The Food Think Tank in partnership with the James Beard Foundation. It highlights more than 400 organizations across the United States leading the way toward building a better food system. Good to see so many groups working to improve our food supply!
The second announcement was from Environmental Working Group, announcing their new food database Rate Your Plate. With information on more than 80,000 foods and 5,000 ingredients from 1,500 brands, EWG’s unique scoring system rates foods based on nutrition, food additives, contaminants and degree of processing.
I have to say, I think Rate Your Plate will be more useful as an educational tool to find out what is in your favorite processed foods, rather than a tool to find something safe to eat. I’m not sure how useful the ratings are going to be here. I looked up “pickles” and only 7 brands were rated “1” (best). I clicked on one and they weren’t organic. This is what happens when you combine concerns. You get a weighted score instead of a clear score in one area. So it’s not a tool for finding organic pickles, but it will show you the 282 brands of pickles rated 5 (not so good).
The benefit I see is that you can type in virtually any processed food on the market that you might be eating and find out how bad it is.
I’m going to stick with my homemade fermented garlic dill pickles. Organic ingredients, no processing, no additives. Beneficial probiotics.
Whole Foods Launches “Responsibly Grown,” a New Rating System for Produce
From Debra Lynn Dadd
I always love it when there are clear-cut standards for labeling. On October 15, Whole Foods introduced a whole new system to help their customers identify fruits, vegetables, and flowers as GOOD, BETTER, or BEST.
Known as “Responsibly Grown,” the rating system assesses growing practices that impact human health and the environment.
Growing practices are reviewed for
– Pest management, including prohibited and restricted pesticides
– Farm worker welfare
– Pollinator protection
– Water conservation and protection
– Soil health
– Ecosystems
– Biodiversity
– Waste reduction and recycling and packaging
– Air, energy, and climate
Having such a standard makes an impact in the field, well, literally in the field. Already farmers are working to move up to get a higher rating.
There are a lot of details, so I’m just going to send you straight to the website, so you can read all about it: Whole Foods: Get to Know Responsibly Grown
dot ORGANIC
From Debra Lynn Dadd
Well, this is pretty cool. Now you can get a domain name that ends in .organic! Like debra.organic. But there’s a catch and a benefit.
You have to qualify. The names are reserved for members of the organic community. Any organization that wants to purchase a .ORGANIC domain must be engaged in the organic sector and meet the criteria established by .ORGANIC.
Here’s who may be eligible to register a .ORGANIC domain
- Certified organic producers, farmers, distributors and the like
- Certified organic textile and skincare providers
- Organic restaurants and venues
- Certifiers in the organic community
- Publications, journalists and bloggers catering to the organic community and industry
- Non-profit, not-for-profit and trade associations that primarily serve and represent the organic community
- As this rolls out, it will be interesting to see how this can help consumers identify organic products.
Like how can consumers find these .ORGANIC businesses? They are not listed on the .ORGANIC website that I can find. Nor could I find the standards by which they are reviewed. I just typed “.organic” into google and got nothing.
Great idea. Let’s see what happens.
Fluorescent Lights May Cause Eye Disease
From Debra Lynn Dadd
Here’s another reason to not use fluorescent lights.
According to an article published in the American Journal of Public Health, increased us of fluorescent lighting my increase UV-related eye diseases by up to 12%.
“The safe range of light to avoid exposing the eye to potentially damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation is 2000 to 3500K and greater than 500 nanometers. Some fluorescent lights fall outside this safe range.”
The light that comes from fluorescent lighting is similar to that of sunlight, bringing UV exposure indoors to homes.
The paper gives many details about fluorescent lighting and it’s dangers.
Compact Fluorescent Lights May Save Energy but Can Harm Your Health
